by Daniel Greenfield
Sanders lost on Rep. Ilhan Omar’s and Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s home turf.
When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rallied with Senator Bernie Sanders at New York City’s largest housing project where her politics had cost the city 25,000 jobs, it was the big radical moment.
Sanders had the endorsement of the Squad which was going to hand him the nomination.
The Left unified behind the Vermont socialist as Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib hit the campaign trail for him. The Sanders campaign, already extreme, became more radical with imams like Omar Suleiman, “Zionists are the enemies of God”, and Al-Hassan Qazwini, Sanders is “an honorable man, even though he is a Jew”, appearing at Bernie Sanders rallies uniting the red and the green.
Along with Sunnis and Shiites for Sanders.
The uselessness of the Squad was already apparent when Rep. Ayanna Pressley, the one member of the Squad who had backed Senator Elizabeth Warren, saw Biden win her district.
But it just got worse for the Squad from there.
In Minnesota, Rep. Ilhan Omar was the warmup act for Sanders at the University of Minnesota’s Williams Arena, where Prince's old band was part of the attraction. Omar, who has lived her life by identity politics, called for a "mass movement of the working class that transcends faith, race, gender, and background."
Sanders falsely claimed that, "Ilhan and I share a common link as the descendants of families who fled violence and poverty, and who came to this country as immigrants." In fact, Omar had come from a wealthy and politically connected family. And her ancestors would have been happy to kill Bernie’s.
But despite Omar’s efforts, Sanders not only lost Minnesota, but Hennepin County, Omar’s district. Rep. Omar, a co-chair of the Sanders campaign, couldn’t even deliver her own district to him.
Keith Ellison, another state co-chair for Sanders, proved equally useless.
A third of Sanders’ campaign co-chairs in Minnesota were Islamists. The campaign had bet on the Islamic vote to make all the difference. Islamist organizations promised that the Muslim vote would completely transform politics with a massive turnout. But in Hennepin's Brooklyn Park, once a pleasant suburban community, now a mostly migrant area, with a large Somali population, Biden still beat Bernie Sanders.
Sanders scored some wins in Minneapolis, including decisive victories in the infamous sixth ward of Cedar Riverside or Little Mogadishu, but the amount of votes cast was negligible. While he won Somali and Muslim areas, not that many of them had actually turned out to vote for an old white socialist.
It may be that Omar’s influence in the Somali community is waning after her public adultery.
In Michigan, the results were even more humiliating. Rep. Rashida Tlaib had tweeted a video she made campaigning for Sanders in Detroit. Emgage Action, an Islamist PAC, had also gone all out for Sanders. A Dearborn rally had opened with Keffiyah dancers, Amer Zahr, a hateful BDS bigot, and Imam Sayed Hassan Qazwini who had once referred to Sanders as an “an honorable man, even though he is a Jew.”
“I look around this room and see people coming from so many different backgrounds. It is beautiful. This is what America looks like at its best," Sanders had told a Dearborn rally with women in hijabs standing behind him. While there were plenty of Arab Muslims rallying behind him, there were no black people.
Bernie’s diversity wore a hijab. And the demographics had changed, but not by quite that much.
Biden crushed Sanders, not only in Michigan, but in Rep. Tlaib’s own district. A place she had only been able to secure as a platform because the black vote was split by infighting among the Conyers clan.
Biden beat Sanders 57% to 35% in Tlaib’s district and 54% to 36% in Wayne County.
Sanders did win 62% of the vote in Dearborn. But that only gave him around 12,000 votes in an election where 1.5 million votes were cast. In a closer election with lower turnout, the Islamists might have made a difference. But instead Bernie lost every single county, including Wayne, where Dearborn is located, improving only a little bit in the area where he had bet his entire campaign. Or rather where the Islamists running his campaign had decided to make their stand on behalf of Bernie 2020.
After Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Michigan, the three M’s, three-quarters of the Squad is out.
Assuming Bernie Sanders stays in the race, the next test will be for the Squad’s leader to deliver in New York. And the odds aren’t good that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will be able to give him the state.
Still it’s the final opportunity for the Squad to snatch even the smallest victory from their defeat.
After Pressley failed Warren, Omar and Tlaib failed Sanders, the party’s top Twitter troll is also the Left’s last best hope to salvage some shred of influence from the smoking wreck of the Sanders campaign.
Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, and Tlaib have all encouraged Sanders to stay in the race and fight on. Even if Bernie loses, they want as much distance as possible between the day of defeat and themselves. And, the campaign employs enough of their political allies that their own infrastructure benefits from the delay.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an architect’s daughter from Westchester, squats in a district full of white hipsters and Puerto Ricans. The white hipsters are Bernie’s core base and he polls fairly well among Puerto Ricans. If she can’t deliver New York for Bernie, she can at least give him her district.
For whatever little that’s worth.
But the Sanders campaign was always about building the power of lefties more than electing Bernie. That was always a longshot. Instead the campaign became a grift for Islamists and assorted radicals who got jobs, status, and a shot at remaking the Democrats in their own twisted and insane image.
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez was the original poster girl, turning her defeat of a white guy living in another state in a gentrified hipster and Latino district into a call for a revolution that would transform the Democrats.
But the revolution hasn’t arrived.
The Sanders campaign is collapsing and the group’s various local candidates haven’t done well either. Instead of mobilizing the Left, Sanders and the Squad succeeded in mobilizing the Democrats to rally against them. The “women of color” were undone by the black voters and working-class white voters who were supposed to flock to Bernie’s call for letting the Boston Marathon bomber vote from prison.
And, after the disasters in Minnesota and Michigan, the lingering question is whether the aggressive Islamist outreach backfired as Muslim voters failed to turn out in significant numbers, while other Democrats were swayed to avoid a campaign that had become toxic with bigots and terror supporters.
Bernie didn’t lose alone. The Squad and its Islamist cohort went down with his sinking socialist ship.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/squads-omar-tlaib-and-islamists-couldnt-deliver-daniel-greenfield/
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